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“I have an almost uncontrollable urge to strangle him,” I snarl to a self-satisfied Archer. “Right this very second, and every hour of every day.”
I pull my panties up and scowl, because we don’t have an ensuite attached to our bedroom. Which means, to get to the shower, I have to walk down our communal hall… and no way am I doing that nude, with an all-too-eager Cato in the apartment.
“Most of the time, I can control that urge,” I muse, “andnotcommit murder. But sometimes…”
“You won’t hurt him.” Archer sits up beside me and bites the back of my shoulder, eliciting a sound from my chest that is part pleasure and part pain. “You struggle to express your emotions, which means sometimes you confuse how you feel. So though you’re exasperated by the prick squatting in our living room—understandable, because he’s a total asshole who would tempt even the pope to commit murder—beneath that frustration is love.”
“Quite the assumption for you to make.” I push up to stand and yank my pants up over my hips. Fastening the button, I glance back and study my handsome, still entirely naked husband as he lounges back and watches me. “You presume to know how I feel, yet when I express those feelings, you tell me I’m wrong.”
“Only when I know I’m right about what’s behind them.” He rests on his elbows, and smirks when his cock sits against his hip. “If he destroyed your coffee machine?”
“I’d whip him with a rope and send him back to his father.”
He laughs. “And if his father was still alive and beating him daily, the way he beat the rest of us?”
Checkmate.
He gives me a look of victory when my eyes flame, and my temper burns hotter. “That’s what I thought.” He pushes off the bed and stalks past me to our door.
Panic jumps in my blood when I think he intends to open it. But he holds the handle instead, and purses his lips when it rattles from the other side.
“Fuck off, Cato,” he barks. “You don’t come into this room. Ever.”
“I just wanna say hey to the doctor,” he smarts. “You in there, Mayet? Come hang out with me. I’m lonely.”
ARCHER
“Walter Earl James.” I set a file on the table in our interview room, and come to a stop behind the chair situated right beside Fletch.
He reclines back, at ease, his left ankle resting on his right knee, and cups a steaming mug of coffee in his hands. It’s barely nine a.m. The city is just getting started with their day. But Fletch and I have already been going for a couple of hours.
And now, we face some asshole who dated Anna Switzer and was, directly or indirectly, the reason she was injured. His actions led to her car accident, and that car accident led to a prescription of the drugs that would eventually aid in her death.
Fuck him and his drive to become famous.
“I don’t know why you’ve got me in here,” Walter whines like a fucking child, a thousand times more annoying than Cato could ever be. “I didn’t hurt Anna.”
“We didn’t even mention why you’re here, bud.” I pull out my chair and take my time sitting down. Find comfort. Pick a speck of dust from my jeans. “Literally didn’t even say her name.”
“It’s all over the news! I’ve already gotten a thousand phone calls. You don’t have to say her name for me to know why you’ve pulled me in, when Miranda London is blasting my face on her hourly segments.”
“Miranda’s a peach,” Fletch drawls. “So talk to us about your relationship with Anna Switzer.”
“What relationship?” he spits back. “We screwed for a few weeks; she was pliable and easy, but boring in bed. Starfished the whole time and considered it hot. She doesn’t suck dick, didn’t talk dirty, and dried up if a man tried to spice it up.” He sits back in his chair, completely oblivious to the disgust that rises in my throat. “She bored me, so when what we had ran its course, I was out.”
“Right.” Fletch takes the file I dropped to the table when I entered, and opens it up. Not to crime scene photographs, like we so often flash in this room, but to news clippings. “These articles sayshedumpedyouafter you called in her whereabouts to the press.”
“I called in our whereabouts to the pressafterI realized we were done.” He rolls his eyes, like he’s bored of our presence.
But it’s the disrespectful fuck sitting in front of me who’s boring. He’s on the shorter, stockier side, compared to me and Fletch. He has a gym-rat’s shoulders—but we’re talking a three-times-a-week gym-rat, not the impressive, dedicated kind—and a face like a smashed pancake.
Despite his unfortunate looks, he aspired to become a movie star.Or was it a rock star? Maybe a social media star?Whatever the fuck he wanted, he knew he needed Anna in order to get it.
“It’s the nature of the beast,” Walter insists. “You wanna be in the public eye, you consent to them knowing about your life. You wanna make millions off the fans, then you gotta be visible to the fans. It’s just the way it is.”
“Uh-huh.” I reach up and roll my bottom lip between my thumb and finger. “So the millions of dollars that Anna donated to childhood cancer research?” I ponder. “Not good enough? The wishes she granted to dying kids, not selfless or visible enough? She sat in hospital wards, singing to those babies for years, and she did it out of love, not for the fame. That wasn’t good enough to earn her some respect and privacy?”
“You want to be famous,” he lifts his chin high, “you pay the price.”
